Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education

Confused About Transparency

[Thinkses in progress – riffing around the idea that transparency is not reporting. This is all a bit confused atm…]

UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme today talking about a new “open and honest reporting culture” for UK hospitals. Transparency, it seems, is about publishing open data, or at least, putting crappy league tables onto websites. I think: not….

The fact that a hospital has “a number” of mistakes may or may not be interesting. As with most statistics, there is little actual information in a single number. As the refrain on the OU/BBC co-produced numbers programme More or Less goes, ‘is it a big number or a small number?’. The information typically lies in the comparison with other numbers, either across time or across different entities (for example, comparing figures across hospitals). But comparisons may also be loaded. For a fair comparison we need to normalise numbers – that is, we need to put them on the same footing.

[A tweet from @kdnuggets comments: ‘The question to ask is not – “is it a big number or a small number?”, but how it compares with other numbers’. The sense of the above is that such a comparison is always essential. A score of 9.5 in a test is a large number when the marks are out of ten, a small one when out of one hundred. Hence the need for normalisation, or some other basis for generating a comparison.]

The above cartoon from web comic XKCD demonstrates this with a comment about how reporting raw numbers on a map often tends to just produce a population map illustrates this well. If 1% of town A with population 1 million has causal incidence [I made that phrase up: I mean, the town somehow causes the incidence of X at that rate] of some horrible X (that is, 10,000 people get it as a result of living in town A), and town B with a population of 50,000 (that is, 5,000 people get X) has a causal incidence of 10%, a simple numbers map would make you fearful of living in town A, but you’d be likely worse off moving to town B.

Sometimes a single number may appear to be meaningful. I have £2.73 in my pocket so I have £2.73 to spend when I go to the beach. But again, there is a need for comparison here. £2.73 needs to be compared against the price of things it can purchase to inform my purchasing decisions.

In the opendata world, it seems that just publishing numbers is taken as transparency. But that’s largely meaningless. Even being able to compare numbers year on year, or month on month, or hospital on hospital, is largely meaningless, even if those comparisons can be suitably normalised. It’s largely meaningless because it doesn’t help me make sense of the “so what?” question.

Transparency comes from seeing how those numbers are used to support decision making. Transparency comes from seeing how this number was used to inform that decision, and why it influenced the decision in that way.

Transparency comes from unpacking the decisions that are “evidenced” by the opendata, or other data not open, or no data at all, just whim (or bad policy).

Suppose a local council spends £x thousands on an out-of area placement several hundred miles away. This may or may not be expensive. We can perhaps look at other placement spends and see that the one hundred of miles away appears to offer good value for money (it looks cheap compared to other placements; which maybe begs the question why those other placements are bing used if pure cost is a factor). The transparency comes from knowing how the open data contributed to the decision. In many cases, it will be impossible to be fully transparent (i.e. to fully justify a decision based on opendata) because there will be other factors involved, such as a consideration of sensitive personal data (clinical decisions based around medical factors, for example).

So what that there are z mistakes in a hospital, for league table purposes – although one thing I might care about is how z is normalised to provide a basis of comparison with other hospitals in a league table. Because league tables, sort orders, and normalisation make the data political. On the other hand – maybe I absolutely do want to know the number z – and why is it that number? (Why is it not z/2 or 2*z? By what process did z come into being? (We have to accept, unfortunately, that systems tend to incur errors. Unless we introduce self-correcting processes. I absolutely loved the idea of error-correcting codes when I was first introduced to them!) And knowing z, how does that inform the decision making of the hospital? What happens as a result of z? Would the same response be prompted if the number was z-1, or z/2? Would a different response be in order if the number was z+1, or would nothing change until it hit z*2? In this case the “comparison” comes from comparing the different decisions that would result from the number being different, or the different decisions that can be made given a particular number. The meaning of the number then becomes aligned to the different decisions that are taken for different values of that number. The number becomes meaningful in relation to the threshold values that the variable corresponding to that number are set at when it comes to triggering decisions.)

Transparency comes not from publishing open data, but from being open about decision making processes and possibly the threshold values or rates of change in indicators that prompt decisions. In many cases the detail of the decision may not be fully open for very good reason, in which case we need to trust the process. Which means understanding the factors involved in the process. Which may in part be “evidenced” through open data.

Going back to the out of area placement – the site hundreds of miles away may have been decided on by a local consideration, such as the “spot price” of the service provision. If financial considerations play a part in the decision making process behind making that placement, that’s useful to know. It might be unpalatable, but that’s the way the system works. But it begs the question – does the cost of servicing that placement (for example, local staff having to make round trips to that location, opportunity cost associated with not servicing more local needs incurred by the loss of time in meeting that requirement) also form part of the financial consideration made during the taking of that decision? The unit cost of attending a remote location for an intervention will inevitably be higher than attending a closer one.

If financial considerations are part of a decision, how “total” is the consideration of the costs?

That is very real part of the transparency consideration. To a certain extent, I don’t care that it costs £x for spot provision y. But I do want to know that finance plays a part in the decision. And I also want to know how the finance consideration is put together. That’s where the transparency comes in. £50 quid for an iPhone? Brilliant. Dead cheap. Contract £50 per month for two years. OK – £50 quid. Brilliant. Or maybe £400 for an iPhone and a £10 monthly contract for a year. £400? You must be joking. £1250 or £520 total cost of ownership? What do you think? £50? Bargain. #ffs

Transparency comes from knowing the factors involved in a decision. Transparency comes from knowing what data is available to support those decisions, and how the data is used to inform those decisions. In certain cases, we may be able to see some opendata to work through whether or not the evidence supports the decision based on the criteria that are claimed to be used as the basis for the decision making process. That’s just marking. That’s just checking the working.

The transparency bit comes from understanding the decision making process and the extent to which the data is being used to support it. Not the publication of the number 7 or the amount £43,125.26.

Reporting is not transparency. Transparency is knowing the process by which the reporting informs and influences decision making.

I’m not sure that “openness” of throughput is a good thing either. I’m not even sure that openness of process is a Good Thing (because then it can be gamed, and turned against the public sector by private enterprise). I’m not sure at all how transparency and openness relate? Or what “openness” actually applies to? The openness agenda creeps (as I guess I am proposing here in the context of “openness” around decision making) and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I don’t think we have thought openness through and I’m not sure that it necessarily is such a Good Thing after all…

What I do think we need is more openness within organisations. Maybe that’s where self-correction can start to kick in, when the members of an organisation have access to its internal decision making procedures. Certainly this was one reason I favoured openness of OU content (eg Innovating from the Inside, Outside) – not for it to be open, per se, but because it meant I could actually discover it and make use of it, rather than it being siloed and hidden away from me in another part of the organisation, preventing me from using it elsewhere in the organisation.

6 Responses

[…] think this possibly echoes some of what Tony Hirst wrote earlier today about open data and transparency. As schools and hospitals and every other social service gets reduced to a league tables of stats […]

Cheers Tony, and good point. There are implications about the way stats and charts are designed (talked about this with a stats professor recently).Have a link to a site where satire and parody collide with charts’n’stats?